Le Café

Las Vegas' Le Le Café

Le Café opened originally as the Club Black Magic on August 18, 1954 at 4817 Paradise Road on the southwest corner of Tropicana Avenue, then known as Bond Road. The Black Magic was the most popular jazz club in Las Vegas throughout the 1950s and '60s. When musicians got off work on the Strip they gathered at the Black magic for all-night jam sessions. This night-stalker ambiance attracted show kids from the Strip, and people who lived on ranches in Paradise Valley rode their horses through the desert to the Black Magic and tied them to hitching posts out front.

In November 1968 Camille Castro, a stylish and flamboyant European lesbian, opened Le Bistro French restaurant in the Black Magic, known by then as the Club de Paris. Camille had owned La Manche a Gigot restaurant on the Isle St. Louis in Paris among whose famous clientele were two well-known Las Vegans: Dunes Hotel owner Major Riddle and Line Renaud, star of the Dunes' Casino de Paris production. Camille was also associated with a celebrated Parisian lesbian bar called the Crazy Horse and she came to Las Vegas from Paris as the lighting engineer when Caesars Palace imported a show called the Crazy Horse Revue. When the revue went down, Camille, bankrolled by Riddle, stayed on to open her restaurant.

Club de Paris and Le Bistro held their grand opening on January 10, 1969 and quickly became a favorite hangout for Las Vegas' gay community, particularly the show crowd from the Strip. Betty Grable, a Las Vegas resident at the time, often hosted parties at Le Bistro, and the cast of Boys in the Band, performing at Caesars Palace during the summer of 1969, gathered at Le Bistro. Las Vegas food critic Fedora Bontempi frequently reviewed le Bistro in her column in Panorama magazine noting that it was the first and the only authentic French restaurant in Las Vegas.